Union
Britain responded to the 1798 rising and to the Irish alliance with invading French forces by taking control of Ireland out of the hands of the Protestant landlord oligarchy who controlled the Dublin parliament. The limited but promising success of the United Irishmen in bringing together the Catholics with a section of the Protestants (the Presbyterian, not, significantly, the Anglicans) had threatened, the existence of their whole system. At war with revolutionary France, Britain needed to secure its own interests. The British Prime Minister William Pitt resolved upon a ‘Union of Parliaments’.
They forced an Act of Union through the Irish Parliament by the bribery and corruption of men who hardly needed to be either bribed or corrupted. Reprimanded for having “sold your fatherland”, one of them is reputed to have replied “And damned glad I was to have a fatherland to sell.”
At that point the Protestants of Ireland tended to oppose Union, Catholics to favour it.
Pitt’s plan for Union involved granting full civil equality to the Catholics with in the new United Kingdom. The half-idiot of a king, George III, vetoed that. Pitt resigned for a while on the issue.
Union without Catholic equality determined the future. To get equality — “Emancipation” — the Catholics organised a mass movement led by Daniel O’Connell and staffed in the towns and villages by Catholic priests.
This movement alarmed the Protestants. Men and women, or their descendants, who had supported the United Irishmen, began to fear a priest-led Ireland and now came to support the Union they had opposed.
The 30-year-long struggle for Catholic Emancipation alienated the Catholics from England. After they won Emancipation (in 1829), O’Connell and his friends came out for “Repeal of the Union”, and an Irish — Catholic-led — parliament in Dublin. The Protestants were now against this: the two elements had swapped around. Revolutionary Republican politics was in the process of migrating from Protestant to Catholic Ireland, though it never touched O’Connell. He was challenged after a time by a movement of a more radical and republican nature, the “Young Irelanders” in the 1840s. Also in the 19th century, the split between Anglicans and Dissenters — now no longer seriously discriminated against — became unimportant.
There were economic reasons for the Protestant/Catholic about-change on the Union and the fading of the Anglican/Dissenter split among Protestants. The north-east of Ireland began to thrive economically within the UK, with new cotton mills, linen mills, and factories. Belfast and the surrounding area became a replica of Manchester, Liverpool, Sheffield and the newly industrialised cities of the English north, integrated with them through trade and a common industrial development. Belfast, previoulsy a minor port, became busier than Dublin after 1835. The opposite happened in the south and west, which were thrown backwards industrially. Ireland became, not one economy, but two-economies, two provinces, connected to Britain through two centres, Dublin and Belfast.
Union threw Ireland wide open to unfettered competition from vastly superior British industry, with no possibility of the protective tariffs an independent Irish state could have erected. Irish industry withered in most parts of the country, and in Belfast became part of British industry.
Most of Ireland was transformed (as Marx put it) into “an English sheep walk and cattle pasture”. The possibility of an independent capitalist Ireland at the end of the 18th century had been destroyed by a combination of economic forces and their reflection — the strength of the English and the feebleness of the Irish middle class.
The Famine
In the early 19th century Ireland was a land of absentee landlords and labyrinthine sub-lettings. Rich men would let large amounts of land from one landlord and then sublet it in parcels to men who would in turn sublet in smaller parcels and so on down. At the bottom of this pyramid, in which lived 8 million people by 1841, hundreds of thousands sublet potato fields of 1/4 acre, to grow their staple food — the potato. This would be supplemented by seasonal work, sometimes in England. Summer, before the harvest, was a time of near starvation for them. This system began to collapse in 1845 when the potato crop was destroyed by blight. The potatoes turned to an inedible mess in the ground. The same thing happened in 1846, ’47 and ’48. Over a million starved to death at the bottom of the pyramid. Then “famine fever” — cholera — struck in the wake of famine up through the social pyramid. People fled the country en masse; vastly crowded ships would sail for America and arrive with half or fewere of their starved and sick passengers still alive.
The potato blight struck everywhere in Europe, but only in Ireland was there mass starvation. While the people starved vast quantities of food — corn — were being exported. Government aid came late — 1847 — and was grudging and inadequate.
After the famine, the population of Ireland fell dramatically. (It is 51⁄2 million today). The memory of the priest and landlord induced docility with which the people let themselves be starved in a fertile country hardened the minds of subsequent generations of nationalists. A great bitterness entered Irish nationalist politics.
The Fenians challenge English rule
Republicanism revived in the 1840s, with the middle class — and still partly Protestant — “Young Ireland” movement, led by Thomas Davis, Charles Gavan Duffy and John Mitchel. On its fringe was Fintan Lalor, whose ideas on landlordism would influence Henry George and through George, millions in America, Britain, Australia, etc, at the end of the century. Repression and famine destroyed this movement. Republican politics made a radical new start in 1858 with the foundation of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, kKnown generally by the name of their American branch, the “Fenians”.
This was a secret society modelled on the left-wing secret societies of France where the IRB’s principal founders, James Stephens and John O’Mahony, were political refugees after 1848 and held membership in one of the secret societies.
The IRA drew on Irish Americans — many of them refugees from the famine — to back revolution in Ireland. They planned an armed rising. In 1865 they had perhaps 15,000 sworn Fenians inside the British army in Ireland. But they did not act. The best chance had been lost through delay when a small scale action occurred in March 1867, the “Fenian Rising”. But the Fenians survived, scattered into factions, shrivelled and transfused into other movements like the Land League. They can be said to have organised the 1916 rising.
Home Rule
At the head of the Catholics of Ireland, whom he welded into a serious political force and raised up from their abject position at the time of the Union (1800/1), Daniel O’Connell in 1840 demanded “Repeal of the Union” and the restoration of an Irish parliament in Dublin. The Union had thrown Irish industry into unprotected competition with British steam-powered machine production and Ireland was being ruined.
Daniel O’Connell’s movement declined and fell apart with his death (1847) and the Famine (1845-48). Irish MPs at Westminster were now mere coteries of job-hunters. In 1870 Isaac Butt, a Protestant lawyer, formed the Home Rule Association, and MPs began to be returned as Home Rulers. But it was still a loose and ineffective party. The MP Joseph Biggar began to change that. A Belfast Protestant pork merchant, Biggar was a Fenian, and when he started his parliamentary activities, still a member of the supreme council of the Fenian Irish Republican Brotherhood. Biggar used guerrilla tactics in Parliament and urged the Irish MPs to do the same. They would filibuster — talk indefinitely — disobey the Speaker, and take every chance offered to disrupt the business of the House of Commons, then still a “gentlemen’s club” of unpaid MPs, with much looser rules than now.
Bygor’s lead was followed by a young Wicklow landlord, a half-American Protestant, Charles Stuart Parnell. Parnell welded the Irish MPs into a phalanx at the heart of British politics, aiming and often succeeding to make the government of the UK unworkable.
They build a powerful party in the country, which collected money to pay MPs who were not “gentlemen”
This was the period of the Land War. When in 1879 crop failures and a general agricultural crisis threatened famine once again the memory of “Black ’47” spurred people into action. They demanded rent cuts, refusing to pay rent. This movement — and in the background the threatening shadow of Fenian terror — gave force to the parliamentary activities. (Some of the Fenians in the underground backed Parnell’s activities.)
All this agitation convinced the most far sighted of British statesmen, WE Gladstone, that Home Rule had to be granted, and in late 1885 he declared himself for it.
Parnell, strictly independent between the British parties had been angling for the support of either party. The Tories, the main party of the landlord class, declared themselves bitterly against Home Rule. Winston Churchill’s father, Lord Randolph Churchill, played “the Orange Card” against Gladstone — how could there be Irish Home Rule if one set of Irish were against it? The Liberal Party split, losing most of its Whig landlord grandees to the Tories and also part of its Radical wing, led by the future arch-imperialist, Joseph Chamberlain. The Tories became the “Conservative and Unionist” party.
Home Rule was defeated in the Commons in 1886 and passing the Commons in 1892, was then vetoed by the lords.
In power for 13 years before 1906, the Tories, combining reform with police rule, tried to “kill Home Rule with kindness,” granting local government (1898) and beginning to transfer land from landlords to peasants, transforming rents into mortgage repayments for many farmers.